Put down that french fry (most of your neighbors in Beaufort County are saying they did)

Did you eat healthy all day yesterday? A new report says most Beaufort County residents would say they did.

The Beaufort County area ranked top 10 in the country among the highest well-being and healthy eating communities, according to the 2017 Gallup-Sharecare State of American Well-Being Index.

According to the index’s 2016 Community Rankings for Healthy Eating, 72 percent of residents in the Hilton Head Island–Bluffton-Beaufort area reported eating healthy all day the previous day, ranking the area seventh in the country.

The Hilton Head Island-Bluffton-Beaufort area also ranked ninth for the 2016 Community Rankings for Well-Being.

The reports, part of the Gallup-Sharecare State of American Well-Being series, examined the well-being and healthy eating choices of residents in 189 communities across the nation.

The healthy eating rankings were based on the question “Did you eat healthy all day yesterday?”

The top healthy eating community in the country was Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island, Fla., which also had the highest well-being in the country for the last two years.

The report also noted that for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression and stress, those who ate healthy all day the previous day had lower disease burden than those who did not eat healthy.

The Well-Being Index measures Americans’ perceptions of their lives and their daily experiences through five elements: sense of purpose, social relationships, financial security, relationship to community and physical health, according to its website.

South Carolina ranked 27 among the 50 states based on the five elements of well-being. While the state overall ranked fourth for the sense of purpose category, it ranked 39 for the physical health category.

The reports’ data are based on more than 350,000 phone interviews with U.S. adults across all 50 states and the District of Columbia between January 2015 to December 2016.

In 2012, Gallup, an American research-based consulting company, and Sharecare, a health and wellness engagement platform, created the Gallup-Sharecare Global Well-Being Index to measure well-being worldwide. Gallup compiles individual responses and categorizes the respondents as thriving, struggling, or suffering in each element.

The Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index is the world’s largest data set on well-being, with more than 2.5 million surveys fielded to date, according to its website.

In March, Beaufort County was also named the home of South Carolina’s healthiest and longest-lived residents, according to the latest iteration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County Health Rankings.

This story was originally published May 3, 2017 at 3:06 PM with the headline "Put down that french fry (most of your neighbors in Beaufort County are saying they did)."